Posted on 03/24/2022 4:47:15 PM PDT by algore
Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. Those are important public resources, advocates say, but federal guidelines for maintaining public records still fall short when it comes to protecting digital assets.
“Web services is the language of the government now, [but] we’re not treating it with the same sort of respect that we are paper documents,” says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the co-founders of a group that initially came together to prevent the Trump administration from destroying environmental data. The group, called Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), is still fighting for public access to resources like the EPA’s online archive.
“We’re not treating it with the same sort of respect that we are paper documents”
The archive is the only comprehensive way that public information about agency policies, like fact sheets breaking down the impact of environmental legislation, and actions, like how the agency implements those laws, have been preserved, Gehrke says. That makes the archive vital for understanding how regulation and enforcement have changed over the years. It also shows how the agency’s understanding of an issue, like climate change, has evolved. And when the Trump administration deleted information about climate change on the EPA’s website, much of it could still be found on the archive. Besides that, Gehrke says the content should just be available on principle because it’s public information, paid for by taxpayer dollars.
“It’s pretty disturbing that the Biden administration would actually be doing some of the same stuff that we worried about under Trump,” says Chris Sellers, another EDGI member and a history professor at Stony Brook University. The default attitude still seems to be, he says, that “if it’s digital, you can toss it.”
“If it’s digital, you can toss it.”
The archive was never built to be a permanent repository of content, and maintaining the outdated site was no longer “cost effective,” the EPA said to The Verge in an emailed statement. The EPA announced the retirement early this year, after finishing an overhaul of its main website in 2021, but says that the decision was years in the making. The agency maintains that it’s abiding by federal rules for records management and that not all webpages qualify as official records that need to be preserved.
The archive certainly wasn’t perfect. “It’s not very user-friendly,” Gehrke says. You can’t search by date, for example, to help you whittle down results from decades of archives. And some pages in the archives link to defunct URLs. But Gehrke would like to see the archive improved rather than dismantled.
Because on line, cloud storage is so expensive. //sarc
because it’s nothing but Comedy
Time to back it up.
Back when the bosses first put a PC on my desk (well, my cubicle) it was immediately obvious to me that the end result of the move to “digital” would be the loss of massive amounts of information.
1984
Down the memory hole.
Hopefully somebody out there is downloading everything for later.
The EPA is useless. The California EPA is redundant. Government jobs attract students with low test scores, low self esteem and low understanding of things like justice. Thankfully, the Creator and Father of every existing things is the Governor of every thing and has a plan for everything, even for low test scoring admins.
How about we just sunset the EPA?
The epa shouldn’t even exist. If they’re erasing their past, I wonder what they’re up to now.
Bad of Trump to suggest but she's fine with it now.
Hypocrite!
I remember when the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published.
I seriously considered buying a set.
Today it is so much easier to edit history.
The really bad global warming started about four years ago. No real need to look back any further than that.
History is racist.
Crap. Wish it was sunsetting itself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.